Jeff Kaplan loves Rust. The former Overwatch lead reckons that Rust shows the absolute best that PvP games have to offer, which is why he's logged over 5,000 hours in it. While Kaplan's love of genre is part of the inspiration behind his new survival game, The Legend of California, you won't see much influence from Rust's brutal PvP here. In fact, his work on World of Warcraft might be a more relevant point of comparison.
"I have always been a huge fan of the survival genre," Kaplan says in an interview with noclip_2. "In particular, I have one favorite game, which is Rust. I've played Rust for over 5,000 hours. The game that we're making is not like Rust in many ways. Rust is really like probably the pinnacle of PvP games. Anybody who's played a lot of Rust knows what I'm talking about. It's the ultimate month-long battle royale."
Presumably, that still leaves Rust a step behind The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which Kaplan recently called "the greatest game ever made."
The Blizzard veteran previously noted that The Legend of California eschews Rust-style PvP in favor of the more chill base-building of games like Valheim and Subnautica. He has, however, also said that "Rust-like mechanics" may be implemented as an option for servers that want them, so a more hardcore experience isn't off the table entirely – just don't expect it to be the main focus.
Some influence also "comes from my background on World of Warcraft, of just wanting to get back to working on a big, open-world multiplayer game. Just, what happens when people from all walks of life are playing in a space like this together?" Personally, that's a question I've always found a lot more interesting than PvP, but we'll see how well The Legend of California can answer it when it hits early access later this year.
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